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Record #3852
Name :
: John HENNESSY (1936 - )


Father
:
Mother
:
BMD and other details
Date of Birth
: 1936 (approx.)

Marriage (1)
:
Marriage (2)
:

Date of Death
:
Abode (1) : Place of BirthEngland
Abode (2) : Place of Death / Burial
Sailing Information
Date of Arrival
: Nov 1947
Country
: Australia

Ship
: Ormonde

Placement Family
:
Homes / Agencys
Institution (GB)
:

Agency
: Catholic Episcopal Migration & Welfare Assoc.
NotesIn 1947, John Hennessy, 11, along with a group of 147 children, arrived at Fremantle, Australia.

Only a few weeks before it sailed, some priests and bureaucrats showed up at his children's institution in England. They were rounding up kids to go to Australia.

"We thought Australia was down the street or it was around the corner," says Hennessy. "How did we know it was on the other side of the world? Well, anyway, they, they came with the stories, you know, that there's fruits there, plenty of fruits."

Not long after they disembarked at Fremantle, they received a lecture from a man in black, the archbishop of Perth.

Hennessy remembers the man's speech: "He said, 'We welcome you to Australia. We need you for white stock.' Because at this stage, the 'white Australia' policy was on. And we didn't know that we were part of the scheme to - to populate Australia with the - the white people. And the archbishop says, 'The reason why we do [is] because we are terrified of the Asian hordes!' Course, we didn't understand that."

These children were a commodity to a continent that was terrified of being overwhelmed by Asia. They had, in essence, been exported by a nation that had a surplus of white people.

Afterwards, the children's fingerprints were taken and they were herded into lines. Says Hennessy: "They grabbed the girls from their brothers. Brothers from their sisters, screaming. And I can still hear the screams today."

These children, who'd been plucked from institutions in Britain, were now trucked to all over Australia. Where? To institutions. No parents were waiting for them - just picks and shovels.

John Hennessy was sent to a place called Bindoon, an institution run by the Christian Brothers, an order of Catholic monks 60 miles from civilization in the sweltering bushland of Western Australia. Bindoon was a home and school for boys. But this was no Boys Town, and education was not the priority.

The priority was construction. Brother Francis Keaney, an imposing, white-haired Irishman who ran the place, was obsessed with building the largest Catholic institution in Western Australia. He used his charges as labor. From sunrise to sunset, the boys built Brother Keaney's shrine, with no shoes, and no questions asked.

Bindoon is a real school now, an agricultural college. But it's still run by the Christian Brothers. And old boys are not welcome, particularly not when they're accompanied by newsmen. When Jim went back with another former inmate (Bob Simon) who helped build Bindoon, they were kicked off the premises. The Christian Brothers are not eager to showcase their past as users and abusers of child labor.

The food at the institutions seemed to have been cooked up in a Dickens novel. At Bindoon, the boys were so hungry one Sunday, 12-year-old John Hennessy led a raid on the vineyard out back. They enjoyed their grapes, but after mass the next morning, Brother Keaney was in a rage. He'd learned of the raid, and he called out for his leading suspect.

Then the man whipped him. "He stripped me naked," he says. "In front of 50 boys, put me across the chair and nearly flogged me to death. I've-I've-I've got medical advice that that's where I got the stutter from." He had never stuttered before that day, and has ever since.

The children say that floggings and beatings were part of a daily routine. The nightly routine with the Christian Brothers included priestly visits to the children's beds. The brothers were taking away boys who were less than 10 years old.

John Hennessy, finally empowered as an adult, ran for public office, campaigning to become deputy mayor of Campbelltown, Australia, a suburb of Sydney. He was reunited with his mother in England.

"When you think that I'm 65, and she's 86, a frail, gentle loving woman, for the first time meeting her only child," Hennessy explained in 1999.

"And to look into her eyes, she got tears, I got tears. We're both trembling. And she said, 'Michael John, where have you been all these years?'" he recalled.

But many years had passed and their first meeting was awkward. They eventually did embrace as mother and son. Hennessy didn't, however, tell her about the mistreatment he suffered at Bindoon.

"I could not, could not in all honesty, tell her the crimes that were committed against me, and other children. She suffered enough, why should she suffer any more?" he asks. 
ContributorsCreated : 2008-05-23 13:03:11 / From original database

Additional Contributions from : mollipops1

Last Updated :

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